One lone cat against a big bad world

Tag Archives: herkimer college

Last Thursday I decided to start using the 8fit app on my phone as far as me working out goes. I originally started using the app early last year but when everything got screwed up I wasn’t able to resume it until now especially with my weight loss going so well.

Right now, I’m really feeling it in my thighs and my arms (not to mention my sunburned shoulders from both mowing yesterday morning and going out on the Canal Trail yesterday afternoon) but at the same time I have never been better. And each of the 8fit workouts I have completed so far have been at least several minutes in length, even though it feels more like I’ve been working out for an hour. And I have also added my ab roller to do about 100 crunches.

I usually finish each workout by drinking some chocolate milk because when I was in college, my gym teacher suggested drinking chocolate milk after each workout for protein instead of protein shakes. In many ways, chocolate milk probably is preferable to shelling out 30 to 40 bucks for a big jug of protein shake powder at work.

And I am starting to see some results in terms of my physical appearance. My gut’s still there but it looks like my abs are starting to show. Pretty soon I should be able to take some shirtless pics.

Unfortunately, I might have to wait to see about a gym membership because I got a new property tax bill that’s not due till next month and I may have to buy a chainsaw or something on Thursday because yard work that’s why.

Also last payday, I managed to pick up two Stephen King books, including his latest book The Outsider and it’s pretty good. I managed to read through it the night I bought it. He’s got another one coming out around Halloween and I can’t wait to pick it up.

Got less than two more weeks of work left before I go on vacation, which ties in with my folks going to another show in New Hampshire that weekend. Last year, I went to their place but this year it looks like I will be at the shop that weekend. At the same time, I can utilize that time to continue working on myself and other things.

It’s been a pretty busy couple of weeks for me and a very good one too, especially when it comes to my weight loss and my social media career.

As of last Tuesday, my weight went down to 227 pounds which means that I have lost nearly 35 pounds in just eight weeks. For me, it’s a big accomplishment especially since I’ve wrestled with my weight throughout my life. But now I think I may finally be starting to get it together.

And that’s not all. I think I may have found the platform that can replace YouTube for me as far as popularity goes. Since I decided to up my Instagram game, I have started to see more likes on my content, whether it’s the cat memes I post or the hot women pics I post every Wednesday for Woman Crush Wednesday or just random pics from my day-to-day life. I started posting pics of my scale documenting my weight loss journey and that was well-received. Now I wish I had posted a before pic of 261-pound me back in April. But other than that, things are going really well.

Throughout my social media career, I found it important to check my demographics for people who view my content. On YouTube, my core audience was male and a majority of my viewers came from the U.S. and Western countries made up the rest of my top viewers. However on Instagram, I noticed a change. On Instagram, while half my audience is in the U.S., I noticed that more than half my core audience is women and Eastern countries are rounding out the top five countries and out of that number I noticed that ten percent of that number comes from Ukraine (they’re second behind the U.S.) followed by Russia. Pretty awesome that I’m pretty much known all over the world even though I’m just a 40-year-old blue-collar American guy from New York.

Also my job recently updated their dress code policy so it’s a little more lenient and I just gotta say that it feels good to not wear collared shirts to work anymore. I feel more normal now.

The weather has gotten better out over the last couple weeks. We had two ninety-degree days back-to-back and last Tuesday I managed to go back to the Canal Trail. However, I couldn’t hang out over by the ruins over by the Fort Herkimer Church because there’s construction going on. And today, I had to watch the shop because my folks are away at a show this weekend and it was a pretty slow day today. But I managed to get some editing done on an older video I am planning to put up on the site.

And I guess that was it for the last two weeks. A very good couple of weeks which I guessing is the start of some kind of comeback for me. Now if I can just get my Facebook page to 100 likes so I can get added features to my page. And I have been thinking about possibly going back to the gym at Herkimer College. I think I can get a membership as an alumni but I won’t be able to do it this time. Maybe next check I might be able to. I’ll have to wait and see.

Well, folks. After a little over a year of waiting and a little over a year after I officially finished classes, the wait is finally over. I am happy to report that I finally got my Associates Degree in Communication Arts New Media from Herkimer College in the mail this morning. So I am now officially an alumni from Herkimer College and finally starting to move up in the world.

Twenty years ago, I never would have thought that this day would happen. I was pretty much convinced that I didn’t need college but rather rely on real world education. However, after years of working in retail and especially after getting started on the Internet, I realized that my earlier attitude toward college was actually just me overreacting.

By the time I actually decided to go back to college around 2010-2011, I had the benefit of online financial aid which did not exist when I graduated from high school in 1997 because the Internet was still in its infancy back then. And in fact, I actually did better in college than I did in high school. Sure it took me four and a half years (partly because I changed my major from Radio/TV Broadcasting to New Media and the fact that I was a part-time student because I was still on overnights at the time) and I was probably older than a majority of my peers, but I stuck to it and I probably also had the advantage of being an established Internet personality. So in short, I have my life as Blackcatloner to thank for this.

And college in turn really helped me out with my Internet career, especially with YouTube. In the two years I spent in Radio/TV Broadcasting, I learned how to edit which was something I never actually paid attention to in my first few years on YouTube. My writing was not really a problem but even that got better. In fact, that’s what sort of led me to create the Tales of the Blackcat site. But my college career was still not without its challenges, especially towards the end of my college adventure. But in the end, I graduated with a GPA of over 3.2, which again was way better than I ever did in high school because in high school, we did not have the advantage of the Internet.

Now that I finally have my degree, I can only hope that this is a start of better things for me. I guess you can say that I’m living proof that good things can happen later in life. Like I said, I never thought that I would be at this point when I was in high school where I pretty much dismissed college as a waste of time. But now, I realize that I made the right decision.

And there’s a good chance that I will be posting a new video sometime next week.

I spent the last week trying to add updates to my laptop which I have been trying to do for the last couple months now and not much has been going on. Of course as of yesterday, Donald Trump has now made it official and I did manage to see him take the oath before I went back to work. Even though both TV’s in the breakroom were showing the inauguration, I was watching it on live streaming on YouTube while trying to upload one of my older videos to Vidme without much success.

But then again, I’m not posting this to talk about Donald Trump becoming president. Instead as I sit here in the library, I figure I’d elaborate on this year being yet another milestone year for me. Like I said, I’m supposed to get my degree in Communication Arts New Media from Herkimer College in the mail sometime within the next couple of weeks which marks the end of almost a year and a half of waiting not to mention four and a half years of actually going to college. And who knows where I’ll be after that. But all I can say is that hopefully things will really start picking up for me.

And on top of that, the fact that I am graduating from Herkimer College this year also coincides with the fact that it has been nearly twenty years since I graduated from Red Hook High School. In fact, even as I write this there are plans for a twenty-year reunion to which I have been added to the group page on Facebook. At press time, they’re aiming for late July. So far I have not committed to anything yet but we’ll see. I do remember one of the early posts I made when I first started up my main website (which I’ll get to in a minute because that is also celebrating a milestone this year) was about the fact that I was dreading returning for my ten-year reunion because let’s face it, I haven’t really changed all that much since high school except for the location and we’ll just leave it at that. But as far as the twenty-year reunion goes, I’ll just have to plan it by year.

In the meantime, my main website is also celebrating its ten-year anniversary this year. Last year I celebrated ten years as an Internet blogger and a presence in social media and next year, I will be celebrating ten years as a YouTube video maker. It all goes by so fast. And speaking of which, I have been toying with some new ideas for upcoming videos and I may just focus on reviews and I might do a podcast every now and then. What it all boils down to is that I am thankful to the Internet for continuing to allow people like me to have a platform to express my creativity that would have otherwise gone to waste in the real world.

But no matter what happens, it looks like 2017 is gonna be a pretty interesting year.